Altered and filtered selfie, UV print on polar fleece, 130 cm x 180 cm

Shown @ Austrian Cultural Forum Tokio and Museum Marta Herford Installationviews @ Look! Zur Enthüllung von Kunst und Fashion, Museum Marta Herford Installationphotos @ Hans Schröder for Museum Marta Herford

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This portrait series was created upon a post-Internet dream achieved with selected content that I fed myself during a period of time. Originally created for the exhibition JAPAN REVISITED at the Austrian Cultural forum Tokyo, the installation consists of two parts: portraits of my virtual alter ego named Kyoko and a poem written by her.

After returning from my one month lockdown-travel through the online culture of Japan I had an intense period of dreaming. Post-Internet dreaming, an act of dreaming IRL after virtual travels, allowed me to access a new possible dimension of consciousness based on processed online experiences. I dreamed of my alter ego, the Japanese girl that I call Kyoko. She appeared as an afterimage of a cultural experience of Internet-based traveling. Kyoko’s existence is solely virtual. She is based in the online culture of Japan’s second generation of digital natives.

Following retouch trends on Instagram profiles of young Japanese girls I retouched my own selfies according to their aesthetics to generate Kyoko’s face in a series of large-format portraits. Excessively blurring my portraits allows me to embody Kyoko, yet the image of her exists only in a half-loaded state of visibility.

For the physical exhibition I decided to give Kyoko a manifestation on a sensitive and sensory-soft material. All of Kyoko’s portraits are UV-printed on soft polar fleece, a material that evokes physical touch and temptation.

Based on keitai shousetsu (cell phone novel tradition) the poem that accompanies the portraits is a smart-phone adapted poem written from the perspective of Kyoko, reflecting on her cultural surroundings. For the setup in the exhibition space this text is activated on the visitors’ own smartphones via an NFC chip placed in the exhibition space next to her portrait.